Presentation Type
Oral Presentation
Presentation Type
Submission
Keywords
court-packing, democracy, law, institutions, norms, process tracing
Department
Political Science
Major
Political Science
Abstract
As attacks on democracy have become increasingly ubiquitous, scholarship has begun to shed light on a common, effective, and inimical means of subverting governments accountable to the masses: court-packing. So, how can democracies prevent court-packing? Among many implicit causal theories taken from the extant research, which hasn’t directly tackled this problem, two seem the most plausible and ripe for analysis, suggesting that court-packing’s success turns on either the strength (i) of institutional constraints or (ii) of domestic judicial norms. To see which theory works better in practice, I use a narrowly tailored iteration of comparative process tracing, as it best aligns with the two theories and the evidence they focus on, particularly vis-à-vis court-packing cases in Poland, Argentina, Hungary, and Israel. Two cases, Poland and Israel, emerge as the most intriguing for analysis, since Argentina and Hungary lie on theoretical extremes. The two cases highlight the careful interplay between judicial norms and how they influence those with draconian ambitions, and how they can spur them to stymie their own court-packing measures—a mechanism that the processes reveal to be much more effective than nebulous, and often avoidable, structural constraints. That finding indicates that a strong culture of judicial norms and their pervasiveness must be considered a proven method of maintaining an independent, robust judiciary—something that, given the world we live in, future scholarship should test through other methods and cases.
Faculty Mentor
Joel S. Fetzer
Funding Source or Research Program
Political Science Honors Program
Location
Black Family Plaza Classroom 188
Start Date
10-4-2026 3:00 PM
End Date
10-4-2026 3:15 PM
Included in
Comparative Politics Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, Courts Commons, International Law Commons
Mister President & May it Please the Executive: Causal Barriers to Court-Packing
Black Family Plaza Classroom 188
As attacks on democracy have become increasingly ubiquitous, scholarship has begun to shed light on a common, effective, and inimical means of subverting governments accountable to the masses: court-packing. So, how can democracies prevent court-packing? Among many implicit causal theories taken from the extant research, which hasn’t directly tackled this problem, two seem the most plausible and ripe for analysis, suggesting that court-packing’s success turns on either the strength (i) of institutional constraints or (ii) of domestic judicial norms. To see which theory works better in practice, I use a narrowly tailored iteration of comparative process tracing, as it best aligns with the two theories and the evidence they focus on, particularly vis-à-vis court-packing cases in Poland, Argentina, Hungary, and Israel. Two cases, Poland and Israel, emerge as the most intriguing for analysis, since Argentina and Hungary lie on theoretical extremes. The two cases highlight the careful interplay between judicial norms and how they influence those with draconian ambitions, and how they can spur them to stymie their own court-packing measures—a mechanism that the processes reveal to be much more effective than nebulous, and often avoidable, structural constraints. That finding indicates that a strong culture of judicial norms and their pervasiveness must be considered a proven method of maintaining an independent, robust judiciary—something that, given the world we live in, future scholarship should test through other methods and cases.